Only Suspense For Google's Q2: What CEO Larry Page Will Say

Robert Hof
, ContributorI cover the collision of advertising and the Internet.Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

Image: Yahoo Finance

Of all companies,
Google seems among the least likely to surprise investors when it reports its second-quarter earnings today just after 1 p.m. Pacific. That's because despite many current and future challenges, the company remains on something of a roll.

Its mainstay advertising business, both the ads that appear next to search results and banner and video ads on YouTube and its partner websites, keeps humming along. Android, while not a direct moneymaker, appears to be positioning Google to thrive in the new era of mobile computing and communications. And YouTube itself has become a multibillion-dollar advertising phenom. Not least, Google keeps creating buzz, if not revenues, from whizzy projects such as its Glass wearable computers, its Nexus smartphones and tablets, self-driving cars, and WiFi balloons.

For the record, analysts expect Google to earn $10.78 per share on gross revenues of $14.42 billion--or excluding payments to website partners, revenues are forecast to be $11.4 billion. That would be up from $10.12 a share on $9.61 billion gross revenues. Update: Well, Google surprised us after all with lower-than-expected profits.

That said, its shares hardly look like a bargain, so any whiff of a slowdown in most any part of its huge business could spook investors. Shares hit an all-time high of $924.69 Monday, up from a recent low of $766 in mid-April. As a result, some analysts have raised their price targets to $1,000, a mark that seems almost certain to trigger other investors to take profits.

For all that, barring always-possible surprises, most eyes and ears will be on comments by Google CEO Larry Page, which will be examined by investors almost as carefully as Ben Bernanke's. Most of all, they'll want to hear how ad prices, or cost per click, are trending. While they have been falling, mostly because of a higher percentage of mobile ads that advertisers pay less for, the decline has eased in the last couple of quarters. More specifically, they'll want to know what he has to say about new ad initiatives such as Enhanced Campaigns and Product Listing Ads.

Investors also will want to know how Google's Motorola unit is doing, in particular whether losses will ease and how new product development is going. They'll especially want to hear about the new Moto X flagship smartphone due out later this summer, but they probably won't get much on that.